


An Intemperate Frost

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Domestic Violence, Harry Potter Universe, M/M, Magic, Possible Character Death, Racism, Wizarding World, mention of lynching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-17 18:59:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12372000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Boyd likes picking fights. Which doesn’t make any sense, because a fight is the one place Boyd’s magic don’t work at all.There ain’t no magic in brawling, Mrs. Crowder scolds them, and Raylan’s raised too well to call her on the lie. Boyd doesn’t stop charming his way into fights, and maybe it ain’t as incomprehensible as it seems.





	An Intemperate Frost

**Author's Note:**

> A very long time ago, laisserais prompted Boyd saying, “Now Raylan, you know I never could resist a fight.” (Or something to that effect.) And so inexplicably I wrote angsty wizarding school Raylan and Boyd fic. Some world building borrowed from Harry Potter, some entirely made up. Quotes from the Robert Frost poem, “Fire and Ice.” Feel free to ask me any questions about the universe or what on earth I was thinking!

The letters come the year Boyd and Raylan turn eleven. They come to the town post office, like all the mail does, though it’s hard to say whether that’s because American wizards don’t disdain Muggle technologies or simply because it’s damned impossible to find any place in the hills when you look for it too hard. It’s easier if you scratch your head, blink real slow and think about something else entirely, think about that first cold, sweet lick off a chocolate ice cream cone and wait for the road to appear. Any Harlan kid could tell you that.

There’s always been magic in the hills. Raylan is surprised to learn, that summer, that there’s magic in him, too.

Arlo says it’s a clerical error. He opens the letters before Raylan can, tears them up slow—or he would, if these were the sorts of letters a man could tear. Instead, Arlo gets his hands stung for tampering with mail that isn’t his, and Raylan gets several ruffled invitations to wizarding schools.

Ohio is closest, technically. Maine is the oldest of the schools, or maybe New Mexico. Washington has a reputation to live up to or down to, depending on who you ask. But none of that makes any difference, not to a Harlan boy. No real child of Harlan goes North to school, or West. They go South. They go to the Plantation.

Arlo hadn’t gone. Folks say Arlo doesn’t have any magic, but Raylan knows the darkest magic decants from suffering, and he’s felt his daddy cast spells with a closed fist that take their power from the blood in Raylan’s mouth or the crying his mama don’t always hide.

Frances hadn’t gone South either, but that was no surprise. Lots of hill girls learnt their craft at home. She ain’t surprised to see Raylan with the letters, even though Raylan’s never done a lick of magic, not once in eleven long years. (There was the time Brutus Hanson called Raylan’s mama a whore in third grade, and lightning cracked the playground before Raylan could crack Brutus’s jaw, but everybody agreed that was just a coincidence.)

Raylan doesn’t do magic, but Boyd does. By eleven, Boyd Crowder can tap his toes and conjure up a glamor that makes folks smile at him, can give ‘em paper and have them believe it’s money til he gets out the door.

Lots of folks won’t let Boyd Crowder into their stores, any more. So he taps his toes and smiles and some other dumb kid goes instead. And if that don’t work…well, Boyd knows as well as Raylan does that you can always cast an Imperius with your fists.

Boyd likes picking fights. Which doesn’t make any sense, because a fight is the one place Boyd’s magic don’t work at all.

“You ain’t gonna join us, Raylan?” Boyd calls across the street, blood gushing from his nose and wriggling out of the headlock Pelatiah Martin’s got him in, Johnny Crowder swinging a bat at Martin’s friends.

“I ain’t figured out who I’m rooting for yet,” Raylan replies, but he wades into the fight, comes out with a black eye and a broken finger and lightning crashing through the sky, blood throbbing through his knuckles and racing through his veins, decanting from the edges of the grin he shares with Boyd.

There ain’t no magic in brawling, Mrs. Crowder scolds them, and Raylan’s raised too well to call her on the lie. Boyd doesn’t stop charming his way into fights, and maybe it ain’t as incomprehensible as it seems.

* * *

There’s no train out to the Plantation. Trains are Yankee inventions, cutting through the South like William T. Sherman burning his way to the coast.

Trains eat coal, and every yard of rail is another Harlan soul lost to the mines.

Kids fly south to the Plantation. There’s a coach up in Lexington, for folks who can pay, but the rest of them pack their bags and let their mamas comb their hair and fill their pockets with raw meat, and then they march out into the hills and whistle loud.

Raylan stands there, holding the meat, and praying the thestrals find him before anything else does. There’s all sorts of things that live up in the hills, and plenty of them that might prefer the meat pulsing warm on Raylan’s bones to the squished mound of raw hamburger in his sweaty hand.

The thestrals come easy, if you’ve got the meat to bribe them. Raylan and Boyd have been out there dozens of times before. Every kid in the county sneaks into the woods, trying to catch a thestral whether they can see them or not. Most kids can, by eleven. Death ain’t exactly an uncommon thing.

It ain’t all bloody—it ain’t always like it is for Boyd, eight years old and watching from the top of the stairs as his daddy shoots a man shaking and begging on their front porch. Death smells like piss and shit to Boyd, tastes like blood where he bites his own tongue, and sounds like a junkie desperate for his next fix and months overdue on his bill. Raylan watches Grandmama Belitha die in bed when he’s four years old, quiet and peaceful as can be, but it’s when the still blows to kingdom come and takes Granddaddy Simon with it that sticks, death that smells like sweet ferment and rot, stings the eyes and glints sharp as pieces of copper coil buried deep in a man’s chest.

So they fly South, Boyd whooping and hollering and nearly plummeting off his mount and into Tennessee, and Raylan clutching at the thestral with his knees and elbows and fingers and chin. Raylan, expecting he’ll be sent back home as soon as the Plantation teachers realize he can’t do magic after all.

Arlo wouldn’t pay for new robes, but Allan Simmons had just finished his third year and hit a growth spurt, and Frances got the robes for cheap.

None of them have wands. Wands are for _Europeans_ , Aunt Helen says, and spits. For Yankees. Wands are for rich folks too lazy to do the magic right. Folks—good, honest, upright folks—(thieving, running, preaching, poor folks) moved to the hills with nothing but themselves, and it don’t take nothing but the body and the hills to make the magic work. A wand ain’t nothing but a conduit, and conduits can be found most anyplace one cares to look.

Some of the kids in Raylan’s house use bones—human or beloved pet, arm or finger bones are best. Raylan keeps his pocket knife on him, scars all down his fingers, because blood is the first magic Raylan learned. (Bo gets Boyd a real, European wand, second year, no telling how. It’s a whippy, cheerful little holly branch with a unicorn hair core and does more harm than good when Boyd tries to flourish through a charm and it nearly blows up in his hand. What the hell was Bo thinking, _unicorn hair_? Raylan’s mama wonders in her next letter, mails it in a box with some stale cookies and a lump of Harlan coal.)

Arlo’s not wasting his money on a wand, he sneers, when Frances suggests it. He says Raylan’s practically a squib. They’ll see that there, kick him off the Plantation before the year is out. Helen sneers right back and drives Frances up to see Cousin Mary, and they come back with a dirty stick that doesn’t make Raylan any better at magic than he was—it channels all the magic Raylan doesn’t have, and the twig never even sparks.

Boyd picks a fight later that day, calls Raylan’s Aunt Helen a dried up bitch, and Raylan knocks out Boyd’s eye tooth and watches a summer storm come crashing over the hills and streak through the sky.

“What the hell did you that for?” Raylan wonders, after, the rain washing the blood off his hands.

Boyd shrugs, hops into the street and kicks water at Raylan from where it’s overflowing the storm drain. “Maybe I just like the storm,” he says, tonguing at his missing tooth, rain dripping off the end of his nose and eyes sparkling like they do when Boyd’s working on his charms, though he ain’t never incanted Raylan into a damn thing.

* * *

Wizards are sorted by pedigree at the Plantation, and Harlan folks—the kids that come in on thestrals, that sit down for the first supper with their robes askew and leaves in their uncombed hair—always wind up in the same place: the dorms built where the servants would have lived, far enough from the main plantation house that the smell of poverty wouldn’t spoil madam’s milk.

(It’s better than the empty dorms where the black wizards get sent, the old slave quarters under the hanging tree. That’s where Raylan meets Ellis, one day when he’s out past curfew his first year. Ellis is a little older than Raylan’s twelve years and sizzling cold to the touch, lynched and butchered in 1883. Most black wizards go to Ohio for school. They finally “integrate” the remainder into Raylan’s house the year after he and Boyd arrive. Limehouse’s in his seventh year, then, and he ain’t happy about the integration, but Limehouse ain’t happy about much of anything, far as Raylan can tell, his banked rage at the integration and the lack of it and the Governors' white robes and hoods twisting the Plantation’s shed full of steel and iron tools into useless knots.)

They don’t send Raylan home. It turns out he does have some magic, after all, though first year he mostly uses it to stay awake through eight history lectures a week. There’s the history of magic, there’s Plantation history and Southern history and the history of… The student before Raylan carved a cheat sheet into his desk, and Boyd says Raylan is living a charmed life. (Boyd winks when he says it, but Raylan ain’t sure why.)

Raylan’s good at Defense—he ought to be, after all the magic his daddy’s wrought—and good with Charms, after a few years. It takes time, learning to cast quick without a wand.

Boyd’s good at Potions, partly because the Potions teacher makes Boyd leave the damned unicorn hair wand outside the classroom, and partly because Boyd’s the only one in the class patient enough to wait for the sediment to appear, to bide his time and shake the ground newt’s wings in slow and wait for Brutus Hanson to walk by before causing an explosion that destroys the cauldron and sends Hanson to the infirmary for days.

They’re both good at Transfiguration. A Harlan child knows how to make do when you can’t do without. (A Harlan child knows what other wizards have forgotten—that magic _is_ , no matter its form. That magic comes from the ground, that in the beginning there was coal and in the end everyone is buried in the same black dirt, smelling of piss and shit and half-brewed moonshine.)

They stay for Christmas. It’s too expensive to go home. Most of their house stays, and the old servants’ quarters are the only crowded place on the Plantation for three weeks. The other kids are from places like Houston or the rest of Texas, Missouri or Georgia or Raleigh; the other kids laugh when Boyd’s mama sends him a sack full of coal for Christmas, joke that it’s because he’s been bad. “Coal keeps the world warm,” Boyd tells them, but no one suspects the boy with the backfiring unicorn wand when Hippogryph house catches fire the next day, nevermind the sooty sigils drawn over every door.

They hear about the war in Britain, of course, but Britain’s far away, and other than a few of the older kids from Hippogryph leaving to join the pure blood cause, it’s nothing but a blip on Raylan’s radar, his day already full with trying to prove that he’s not a squib after all.

* * *

Bowman makes it in, though nobody knows how, boy’s never shown an ounce of magical talent in his life. Raylan would suspect Boyd of fudging the results, only he doesn’t know how Boyd could. Bowman comes the same year Ava does. She can’t see the thestrals they’re riding on, and Raylan can’t take his eyes off her the whole way, eleven and small and frightened because she feels like she’s got nothing to hold onto but thin air. He wants to steal her frightened cherry smile. He wants to press his dirty fingers to her pretty gold hair until the gleam is buried under soot and scars. (He and Boyd have been sneaking into the abandoned mines and digging for shards: Raylan charms them down and Boyd tries not to blow anything up before they can leave. Even his mama’s furious scrubbing couldn’t spell him clean, but both their bags are brimming with good-sized shards of coal.)

Ava’s good at Charms, of course, petite and brimming with charm of her own, wielding her great-grandmother’s snappy little rowan wand. Bowman is also, inexplicably, good at Charms: quick, cutting spells that spark with energy. (He’s no better than Boyd with that damn unicorn hair wand, but he steals a sleek dragon core wand off one of the Hippogryph boys his first week, offers the fair trade of the wand for the boy’s unbroken bones, and that filched wand seems to work just fine. Of course it does. Bowman’s a Crowder, after all—purloined magic is the only kind they know.)

Johnny’s parents never send him—Johnny claims he got the letters, same as the rest of them, only wizarding school is for pussies and the only magic he needs is in his throwing arm—and sometimes Raylan envies him, sitting in History class and doodling third base with his quill, struggling through Charms while their Hippogryph classmates sail along on the breezes created by their fancy wands.

“I suspect that wand is the only one that wins women into your bed,” Boyd tells Aloysius Jackson. The melee that follows is better than their best quidditch game—wizarding football, Bowman calls it, ought to have its own name so no one confuses it with that pussy European game—Raylan winds up in the infirmary with a snapped wrist, puts three other boys in with second-degree burns, and watches Boyd’s bloody smile when lightning sets the lynching tree on fire.

They don’t see Ellis again, after that. “You think the lightning got him?” Raylan wonders, he and Boyd out past curfew, hands so dark with coal that they could very nearly transfigure themselves.

“I think the white folks got him,” Boyd answers, rubbing his sooty hand over the charred stump of the tree. “The lightning just set him free.” Freedom smells like ozone, then, cracks like a gunshot and burns like dying for the second time. “Why?” Boyd asks, smirking, blood dried black in his chapped lips. “You think the world ends in fire? Or in ice?”

“I think it ends in Harlan,” Raylan says, and walks away before Boyd can spell his way into another fight.

* * *

They make it to graduation, somehow, lined up in the very back with the rest of their house, fitted in the families’ best third-hand robes, worn once with each generation and then folded reverently away and preserved.

Boyd picks a fight. He leaves coal handprints on silk dress robes, cuts his knuckles and waits for the sediment to fall and the cauldron to explode.

Boyd’s told never to come back to the Plantation, and they ride their thestrals home in the rain, the creatures twisting their heads to lick at the blood on their hands and knees, the scent of rotting meat and forest decay and ash when Raylan’s thestral swipes its tongue over his swollen face.

The quidditch pitch doesn’t blow up until the day after they’ve gone. It leaves a crater, a black scar on the pristine Plantation lawn that resists all attempts to spell it away. _I hold with those who favor fire_ , curls up in the smoky remnants of teachers’ failed charms and incantations, the words spilling soot and ash onto pressed robes and European wands. They bring a backhoe in, finally, because the kind of folks that buy wands have forgotten that the dirt is the first magic and the last. They fill the crater in the Muggle way, and cover it with seed. It works, for the most part, though they have to add another layer of soil every time it rains.

* * *

They find work in the mines, because magic doesn’t change anything, not really, not for Givens and Crowder boys. Boyd concocts dynamite and Raylan transfigures walls using magic they taught themselves in abandoned mineshafts years before, digging to fill their school bags instead of digging to fill the coffers of Black Pike.

Coal is a conduit, Boyd tells the Muggles on their crew, but he’s lying, because coal is more than that, coal is the first sediment in the potion of the hills, coal is the beginning and the end, coal is the root of the fire, the filament of a womb and the dust left in the coffin when all else fades away.

Boyd picks a fight, and coal is a conduit and lightning underground can bring down a mountain and it’s coal that lines men’s coffins, that forms their graves.

Raylan’s magic cuts the path and Boyd’s charms them out of death’s grasp. They fall to their knees, chests heaving, inexplicably safe and above ground. Boyd checks his granddaddy’s stopwatch. Checks the sky.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Raylan demands. He shoves Boyd away and tumbles after him, his fingers clenched in the fabric over Boyd’s chest. Boyd’s spells don’t always go according to plan, but they never fail to explode. Raylan can feel men dying, in the mine, blood and pain and coal and suffering decanted and spilling out of the earth. Suffering is the magic Raylan knows best. “Are you trying to kill us?”

“Folks have already done that,” Boyd replies, eyes bloody and face black with coal, wheezing from the dust and Raylan’s weight on his chest, shaking with the magic pouring out of the earth. “I’m only trying to perish for the second time.”

* * *

Raylan leaves. He doesn’t pack any coal. He joins the Marshals, and carries a gun that he never has to reload. He never misses; and no one notices if his gunshots smell like ozone, if they burn like a hollow tree or flash like the afterimage of a lightning strike.

He can still smell that scorched night twenty years later when they send him back to Harlan. Dark magic lingers longest, magic forged with blood and pain and rooted in every grain of Harlan soil. He presses his hands to Boyd’s shirt and wonders that it doesn’t singe, watches Boyd set those long fingers against his skin and feels it like a shock, checks his wrist on the ride home and is surprised no sooty fingerprints are left behind.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks Boyd, sitting in Ava’s dining room, one hand for the chicken and one for his gun. (He can cast through the drumstick bone, if need be. Harlan children learn how to make do.)

Boyd checks his watch. He watches Raylan chew on the chicken leg and smiles, charm sparkling like firecrackers in his eyes. “Now, Raylan,” he says, smirking, his teeth all white and unbloodied and new, “maybe I’m just angling for a peaceful dinner with a friend.”

“Bullshit,” Raylan replies, talking with his mouth still full. “You’re the one brewing up the storm.”

It ends with an explosion. Boyd’s spells always do.

“You really did it,” Boyd whispers, still smiling, blood pooling black over his chapped lips, the house burning down around them and Ava's golden hair dark with soot. “It ends in fire, Raylan. I’d hoped it would.”

It ends in Harlan with Raylan’s fingers curled into Boyd’s chest, the crack of a lightning bolt and the smell of ozone and blood, shit and piss and a junkie begging for a fix, half-brewed moonshine and a shattered still.

Magic doesn’t change anything, not really. Not in Harlan. Not for folks like them.


End file.
